What it takes to live in Bali: the permits, the tax, the rent and the everyday problems.
Living in Bali is easy to start and harder to keep going. You need an Indonesian permit to stay, Indonesian tax follows once you qualify as a resident, and you can never own the land under the villa. What you get back is a warm, cheap, well-connected island with a foreign community large enough that English, international schools and Western food are easy to find.
Bali is a province of Indonesia, so the rules on whether you can live here are set in Jakarta. The permits, the tax brackets and the property law are the same as for living in Indonesia anywhere else. What differs on the island is what a month costs, which area you live in, how good the hospitals are, and how long people last before they fly home.
Many foreigners who plan a year here leave after eight months. The usual reasons are the traffic, the wet season and visa paperwork that never ends.
Updated August 2026
Bali sets none of this. Residency, tax and property are national rules, so the figures below are Indonesia’s and apply the same wherever you live in Indonesia.
How a country decides what it can tax you on. "Worldwide" means income you earn anywhere; "territorial" means only income earned inside the country; "remittance basis" means only the foreign income you actually bring into the country.
The profit you make when you sell something for more than you paid, like shares or property.
Whether you can keep your current passport after becoming a citizen here. "Conditional" means it is limited or not guaranteed: allowed only in certain cases, or tolerated in practice but not written into law.
Under the Common Reporting Standard, tax authorities in participating countries automatically share information about each other's residents' bank accounts.
| Annual taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| Up to IDR 60M | 5% |
| IDR 60M to IDR 250M | 15% |
| IDR 250M to IDR 500M | 25% |
| IDR 500M to IDR 5B | 30% |
| Over IDR 5B | 35% |
Non-taxable income (PTKP) of IDR 54,000,000/yr for the taxpayer, plus IDR 4,500,000 each for a spouse and up to three dependants, reduces the base before the brackets apply. Rent from land or buildings is taxed separately at 10% final. Non-residents pay 20% flat on Indonesia-source income.
Sources: tax · immigration
Bali has no separate tax system, so this is Indonesian resident tax. Once you qualify as a resident, foreign salary, a pension, dividends and anything you earn locally all fall into the same progressive brackets.
Money you earn from work or business done inside Indonesia. Income earned where you live is almost always taxable there, so it feeds the brackets in full.
Income from outside Indonesia: salary, freelance, a pension, rent and the like. Indonesia taxes worldwide income, so this joins the same brackets as local income. A tax treaty with the source country can reduce or credit what you owe, and pensions especially are often taxed differently under a treaty, so treat this as a rough figure.
Dividends from companies or funds outside Indonesia. They are taxed as ordinary income here unless you reinvest them locally for three years, which the toggle under the field applies. A treaty may also credit tax already withheld abroad.
A rough guide only. It applies the single-status personal allowance (PTKP), taxes foreign dividends as ordinary income unless you reinvest them locally, and ignores social security, tax treaties and the skilled-worker exemption. Confirm your own numbers with a tax adviser.
Tax rates from PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries.
Bali issues no permits of its own. These are the Indonesian routes people here actually use, cheapest first.
Indicative figures for mid-2026; amounts and fees change, and the E33F pension threshold is disputed between sources. Confirm current numbers with Indonesian immigration (imigrasi.go.id), and see our Bali visa guide for the detail on each route.
Landlords here usually ask for six or twelve months of rent up front, in rupiah, before you have an Indonesian bank account. That first transfer is often the biggest payment of the whole move, so a better exchange rate on it can save you more than a month of careful budgeting.
A wire from your home bank is rarely the cheapest way to send it. Compare what each service delivers in rupiah, then read the Bali money guide for ATMs, cards and QRIS once you are here.
Bali scores well on daily life: it is cheap, warm and safe enough, with better hospitals, schools and flights than most islands its size. It loses points on property rights, yearly permit renewals and the roads. Each score is out of 100 and compared with the other countries on RoamFX; tap the info icon on any row for the reasoning.
The same place can be easy for one kind of move and closed to another. Each score mixes the visa route and how that kind of income is taxed with cost of living, safety and the rest. Open "Why this score" for the reasoning.
Living on a pension, usually 50 or older.
The other rows come from the living-here scores above.
Retired early, living on dividends, interest and gains.
The other rows come from the living-here scores above.
Paid by clients or an employer in another country.
The other rows come from the living-here scores above.
Hired by a company in the country, on a work permit.
The other rows come from the living-here scores above.
Almost every foreign resident lives in the south or in Ubud. The area you pick decides your commute, your neighbors and most of your rent.
The remote-work center of the island: cafes, coworking and surf, plus the worst traffic and rents around 30% above the island average. It also has the most gyms on the island.
Ten minutes further up the coast from Canggu, quieter, and being built up fast.
Inland, green and a few degrees cooler, built around yoga, food and a slower day. Cheaper rent, longer drive to a beach.
Flat, calm and on the east coast, with the oldest foreign community on the island and rent at about the average. Fast boats to Nusa Penida leave from here.
Clifftops and big villas, and the highest rents on the island after the recent building boom. You need a scooter or a car for everything.
Seminyak is polished, walkable and full of restaurants near the beach. Umalas, inland, is quieter and more residential.
The actual city: local prices, the hospitals, the immigration office, and almost no other foreigners.
The practical things people look up before a move.
MythBali has its own visa.
RealityIt does not. Every permit is Indonesian and issued under Indonesian rules. The island just has more agents selling help with them.
MythLive in Bali and your income is untaxed.
RealityOnce you are an Indonesian tax resident, Indonesia taxes what you earn anywhere in the world.
MythYou can buy a villa.
RealityYou can hold the building and a right to use the land, but not own the land. Hak Pakai can last up to 80 years with its extensions, while most villas here are sold on a plain 25-year lease. Check which of the two you are being sold.
MythIt is cheap, so money stops mattering.
RealityRent inland is cheap. Canggu rent, a car, school fees and imported groceries are not, and together they cost about what a mid-size Western city does.
MythA year here is a year off.
RealityThe people who last treat it as an ordinary life with better weather. The ones who treat it as a long holiday usually leave within a year.
Only with an Indonesian permit, and there is no Bali-specific one. The routes are the same as anywhere else in the country, and our Bali visa guide walks through each. In practice, foreign residents here are on one of:
One person on a normal remote-work setup spends about USD 1,700 a month. That means a modern one-bed, a coworking desk, a scooter and eating out several times a week. A simple room inland with warung food and no car costs closer to USD 790. A villa with a pool, a car and dinner out most nights is around USD 3,060. These are worked examples built from current local prices, not island averages.
Where you rent changes the total more than anything else. Based on local listings, rent in Uluwatu and Canggu is 30 to 40% above the island average, Seminyak about 20% above and Sanur about average. Ubud is around 15% below and Denpasar a third below. For specific villas the gap is far wider: the same two-bed pool villa can cost more than twice as much in Canggu as in Denpasar.
The full breakdown, with a calculator you can set to your own household and area, is on the Bali cost of living page.
Freehold, Hak Milik, is reserved for Indonesian citizens, in Bali as everywhere else in the country. The only ways a foreigner ends up holding it are becoming Indonesian, which means giving up your own passport, or inheriting it, which comes with an obligation to sell it on. Neither is a way to buy a house.
What you can register in your own name as a foreign resident is Hak Pakai, a right-of-use title. Under the 2021 land regulations it lasts 30 years, can be extended by 20 and renewed by a further 30, so up to 80 years if each step is granted. That is very different from the plain 25-year lease most Bali villas are marketed on. Apartments can also be held on strata title, and a PT PMA company can hold Hak Guna Bangunan, the right to build.
Stay away from nominee deals, where an Indonesian holds the title on your behalf. They exist only to get around the rule above, so the courts treat them as void, not as a contract you can enforce. If the nominee keeps the property, you have no legal claim to it.
Check the building as well as the title. The south has been building flat out for a decade, and construction quality is very uneven: villas go up in months, and cracked pools, damp, bad drainage and subsiding retaining walls turn up on properties only a few years old. Get an independent survey instead of trusting the photos. Look at the land next door too, because the empty lot beside a quiet villa can become a building site.
For most people, renting is the better choice. Yearly rentals are easy to find, and renting keeps you out of a decades-long bet on an island that is changing fast. If you do buy, the title type is the most important decision, so use an independent notary, not the seller's.
When you rent, try to spread the payment. Landlords often want twelve months up front, and once they have the money, fixing the aircon or the water pump stops being urgent. Paying quarterly or in two installments keeps some leverage. Expect a higher monthly rate for it, and write the repair responsibilities into the agreement.
You need a KITAS or KITAP. BCA, Mandiri, BNI and BRI all ask for one before they open a personal account. On a tourist visa you will live on a foreign card and ATM withdrawals at first, which the Bali money guide covers. OCBC NISP and a few Permata branches have opened accounts for foreigners without a stay permit, usually with a larger deposit and more questions.
Answers vary by branch. Indonesian bank staff have a lot of discretion, so a no in one office can be a yes in another the same week. Arriving with every document complete does more for you than arguing.
BCA is the default for most foreign residents. It has the most ATMs on the island, an app in English, and an account number every landlord, agent and mechanic already knows how to pay into. CIMB Niaga is worth a second account if you are paid in more than one currency, because it holds foreign currency alongside rupiah. Its ATMs here are few, so most people keep BCA for cash. If you are on the Second Home Visa, the deposit has to sit in a state bank (Mandiri, BNI, BRI or BTN), and BCA does not qualify.
Get an Indonesian SIM before you go to the branch. Mobile banking here sends codes to a local number, and without the app the account is hard to use. With the documents in order, BCA and CIMB Niaga often open the account the same day and hand you a debit card. The state banks take longer and ask more questions.
A local account lets you pay by QRIS at warungs, markets and parking, use the local wallets (GoPay, OVO, DANA), and receive money from home in rupiah instead of taking it out of an ATM a few million at a time. Once it is open, note two things. A transfer only lands if the name matches the account exactly. And interest on Indonesian savings is taxed at a flat 20% at source, so a savings account here is not worth it for the interest.
You have to go in person, whatever the app suggests, and bring:
Buying a SIM is easy. Any Telkomsel, XL Axiata or Indosat store will sell you a prepaid number against your passport and register it at the counter, and a starter pack with a month of data costs a few dollars. Get one in the first week. Bank verification codes, QRIS payments, GoPay, OVO, DANA, Gojek and Grab all need a local number to work properly.
A phone you bought abroad stops working on Indonesian networks after 90 days unless you register it. Indonesia keeps a register of handsets, and foreign phones are not on it. When the shop sells you the SIM, it files a tourist registration that clears your phone for 90 days, so nothing looks wrong at first. After that the phone only works on Wi-Fi. A new SIM does not help, because the block is on the handset, not the number.
If you are here to live, register the phone with customs. Do it at the arrivals hall in Denpasar before you walk out, and the first USD 500 of the declared value is exempt, which covers a mid-range phone outright. Once you leave the terminal you have 60 days to register at a customs office, without the exemption. You can register two devices per passenger, under customs regulation PER-13/BC/2021.
Above the exemption you pay 10% import duty, with VAT of about 11% on top, and since June 2025 there is no income tax on a passenger's own phone. Register late and the same rates apply to the whole value. The calculator below works out what your phone would cost.
A roaming eSIM from a foreign provider connects as international roaming, which the handset register does not cover, so it keeps working whatever your phone's status. That works for a few weeks but gets expensive over a year. A local eSIM is an Indonesian profile and follows the same rules as a plastic SIM. Most people who stay buy a phone here instead. Anything sold legally in Indonesia is already registered, and a decent mid-range Android costs less than the tax on a flagship you carried in.
Keep the number once you have it. Prepaid numbers lapse if you stop topping them up, and losing yours means redoing verification on every account tied to it. With a KITAS you can move to a postpaid plan that bills monthly and does not expire.
Customs uses its own weekly exchange rate, so the final rupiah amount can differ a little. A phone you register late, outside the customs area, pays on the full price.
Thinking of buying a new iPhone first? See what iPhones cost in Indonesia, compared with Singapore and Malaysia.
You can own a vehicle in your own name if you hold a KITAS or KITAP. Samsat, the office that registers vehicles, wants the permit, the passport behind it, and your residence papers: for a KITAS holder that is the SKTT (certificate of residence), and a KITAP holder can use their resident ID card. A tax number is asked for more often on cars than on bikes. On a tourist visa you cannot register anything, which is why so many scooters in Canggu belong on paper to an Indonesian friend, a landlord or an agent.
The STNK is the registration card you keep with the vehicle. It lasts five years, with the road tax paid and the card endorsed every year, and at the five-year mark the vehicle is inspected and gets new plates. The BPKB is the ownership book, and you keep it at home. Whoever is named in the BPKB is the owner, whatever the receipt says and whoever paid, so a bike still in the seller's name is not legally yours.
Transferring a vehicle into your name is cheaper than it used to be. The transfer duty on used vehicles, BBNKB II, was dropped nationally on 5 January 2025 under the 2022 revenue law. A balik nama (change of owner) now costs only administrative fees. On a motorbike that is IDR 225,000 for the BPKB, 100,000 for the STNK and 60,000 for plates, so IDR 385,000 in document fees. The physical inspection, the small SWDKLLJ accident levy and a mutasi fee (if the bike is registered in another regency) come on top, and the total is still well under a million. Expect a day or two at the Samsat counter, or pay an agent to do it.
Bring the seller, or at least a copy of their ID and a signed receipt, along with the original STNK and BPKB. Samsat checks the chassis and engine numbers against the book in front of you.
Check the STNK is current before you pay. Cheap secondhand bikes often have something wrong with the papers. Under article 74 of the 2009 traffic law, a vehicle left un-renewed for two years after its STNK expires can be deleted from the register, and a deleted vehicle cannot be registered again. The arrears stay with the vehicle, not the seller, so whoever renews the STNK next pays the back tax and the penalty.
The yearly tax is small. Road tax (PKB) is just over 1% of the vehicle's assessed value under Bali's 2024 tax rules, plus a regency surcharge of 66% of that tax. A small scooter costs a couple of hundred thousand rupiah a year and a family car a few million. The same rules dropped the higher rate on second and later vehicles. Pay at a Samsat counter, a Samsat van or through the SIGNAL app.
Insurance is a separate purchase. The levy inside the STNK pays into a national accident fund and is not cover. Private policies come as total-loss-only or all-risk.
Rent by the month until you know you are staying. Buying is only worth the paperwork if your permit lasts longer than the process takes. Either way you need a license: a SIM C (the Indonesian motorbike license) or a SIM A for a car, or your own license plus an international driving permit for a short stay.
You can, through a PT PMA, but a legally foreign-owned company can still be operating an illegal business. Many foreign residents here have a cafe, a villa operation or a small agency. The usual advice is to set up a PT PMA, get an investor KITAS, and start. That leaves out the rules on money and on what the company may do.
Two money tests apply, and they are separate. A PT PMA needs IDR 2.5 billion of paid-up capital under the 2025 investment rules, and generally more than IDR 10 billion of investment, excluding land and buildings, per business line per location. The E28A investor KITAS is a different test: you personally have to hold at least IDR 10 billion of shares in the company sponsoring you, roughly USD 610,000. Meeting one does not mean you meet the other.
What you are allowed to do depends on your company's KBLI code (the official Indonesian classification of business activities), not on what you call the place. A restaurant in a fixed building, as opposed to a cart or a stall, is KBLI 56101 and open to full foreign ownership. The cafe and drinking-house code is open nationally but blocked for new foreign-investment applications in Bali. Warungs and small retail are mostly reserved for Indonesian small businesses.
Holiday villa rental is closed to foreign-owned companies. It is reserved for Indonesian cooperatives and small businesses, so a PT PMA cannot legally operate an ordinary four- or ten-villa rental business on the villa license. Putting it in an Indonesian friend's name is the nominee arrangement that investment law bans outright. Some accommodation is open to foreign investment, including a genuine hotel and the condotel category, but the building, zoning, license and KBLI code all have to match what you actually operate. In May 2026 Bali closed new foreign-investment applications in 18 categories, among them star and non-star hotels with less than 6,000 m² of building area.
The rules are enforced. Through 2025 BKPM (the government body that approves and polices foreign investment) inspected foreign-owned businesses in Bali, found 426 with licensing violations and sanctioned 423 of them. The reasons were nominee shareholding, operating in a closed sector, investing less than the minimum, shell companies, and missing building or environmental permits. BKPM has said it will push harder in 2026.
Land and building permits matter as much as the company papers. On 21 July 2025 the authorities began demolishing 48 buildings at Bingin Beach in Uluwatu: villas, homestays, restaurants and other tourism businesses, most of them two to four stories and one of them nine. Several had been trading for over a decade, and the largest for close to nineteen years.
They came down because they stood on Badung regency government land, inside the protected coastal setback, against the spatial plan and without building permits. Bali's provincial parliament also raised cliff cutting and height breaches. A May 2025 investigation listed 33 Indonesian owners against six foreign ones. The rules had not changed either: officials had discussed acting since 2023, and did not move until the provincial parliament pushed it back onto the agenda.
Do things in the right order. Settle the KBLI code and check it can be registered in Bali at your scale before you sign a lease or spend money on the place. Use a consultant who is willing to tell you no.
Working in your own company on the wrong permit is a separate offense. Bali Immigration deported 342 foreigners in the first half of 2026, mostly for overstaying and misusing a residence permit, and people caught working on a tourist visa are among those cases.
Indonesian tax residency is based on how much time you spend in the country: broadly 183 days in a twelve-month period, or being present with the intention to stay. Once you are a resident, Indonesia taxes your worldwide income at progressive rates up to 35%, whether it lands in an Indonesian bank or a foreign one.
Your actual rate can be much lower than 35%. Foreign dividends reinvested in Indonesia and held three years are exempt. Selling listed shares costs 0.1% of the sale value instead of a tax on the gain. Some skilled newcomers are taxed only on Indonesian-source income for their first four years. Which of these helps depends on where your income comes from.
The estimator above uses the current brackets and the single-status personal allowance. Treat it as a starting point and confirm your own position with an adviser. The E33G is often sold as a nomad visa, but it does not exempt you from any of this.
BIMC in Kuta, Nusa Dua and Ubud, and Siloam in Denpasar and Kuta, handle everyday medical needs well: infections, stitches, dengue, scooter road rash, routine surgery. Standards are higher than you would expect on an island this size, because tourists and their insurers pay well for care and the private hospitals are built around that.
Specialist care is where Bali falls short. Complex heart, cancer and major trauma cases are stabilized here and then, depending on the condition and what your insurer agrees to, moved to Jakarta or Singapore. Before you buy a policy, check that it pays for medical evacuation and treatment abroad, not just a hospital bed in Denpasar, and read what it excludes.
BPJS, Indonesia's public health insurance, is open to KITAS and KITAP holders once you register and keep paying contributions. It is cheap and worth having, but almost nobody relies on it alone. Take private insurance as well and check it covers scooter accidents, pregnancy and existing conditions, the three things people most often find are missing.
Dengue is a risk all year in Bali and peaks in the wet season. Keeping mosquitoes down around the house does more for you than any clinic can after you catch it.
The air in Bali is cleaner than Jakarta's, but it is not clean. The WHO guidelines for PM2.5 are 5 micrograms per cubic meter as an annual average and 15 over any 24 hours, and the south of the island is above both for much of the year. Part of it is traffic. The rest is smoke.
Waste is burned here, at the roadside and in gardens, and the waste collection system is in the middle of being replaced. Suwung, the landfill for Denpasar and Badung, was ordered to stop accepting organic waste on 1 April 2026 and to shut completely from August. The waste-to-energy plant meant to replace it is not due to open until 2028.
Trucks were turned back at the gate, and within weeks Denpasar reported a jump in waste going into its rivers. Reports from Dalung and Canggu describe roadside burning and evening haze. Much of what burns is household plastic, and that smoke is more harmful than a garden bonfire.
If you have asthma or a small child, or you are used to clean air at home, you will notice this in the first few months. The Bali guide shows the live air-quality reading for the island. Check it on a smoky week, but the annual average matters more for your health than any one evening.
You cannot change the air outside, so spend the money on the air indoors. A HEPA purifier rated for the room, running in the bedroom overnight, is the most useful thing you can buy. Villas here leak air, so treat one room properly instead of the whole house badly. Pair it with a cheap PM2.5 monitor, because nobody can smell the difference between 15 and 60 micrograms, and the reading tells you when to shut the windows.
Split-unit air conditioning is not a filter. The mesh behind the front panel catches dust, needs washing monthly in this climate, and does nothing about fine particles. In the wet season a dehumidifier does more against mold than turning the aircon colder.
Check for this before you sign a lease. Ask the landlord what the room smells like in February, look for mold along the ceiling line and behind wardrobes, and look at the land around the house, because an empty lot next door is where the burning happens.
Bali has more international schools than an island of 4.3 million people usually would, because the foreign community has been here for decades. Published 2026/27 fees start at about USD 3,000 a year per child and reach USD 20,000 before uniforms, buses and trips, and they are usually a large part of a family's monthly costs.
Families tend to settle in Sanur, Umalas or around Ubud rather than Canggu, mostly because of the traffic and the daily drive to school. For everyday illness, children use the same hospitals as adults.
The main international schools, by curriculum:
Last checked on: August 2026
Last checked on: August 2026
Fees vary by school. See the schools and more living costs on the Bali cost of living page.
Traffic is the main reason people leave. The road network in the south was built for a fraction of the current load, and a ten-kilometer trip through Canggu at the wrong hour can take an hour. It is the single biggest difference between visiting and living here.
The wet season, roughly November to March, brings flooding on the small roads, mold in cheaper houses, and ocean plastic washing up on the west-coast beaches.
Water and waste are slower problems. The island takes groundwater faster than it refills, dry-season shortages hit the busiest areas first, and construction has not paused.
Almost nobody arrives expecting the air quality, and evenings have been smokier since Suwung landfill stopped taking the south's waste. The air quality section above covers what helps indoors.
Permit paperwork never ends. Most foreigners hold one- or two-year permits with an agent on retainer, so there is always a renewal, a document or a fee due in the next few months.
If the traffic and the building work would break it for you, Lombok next door is the usual alternative. It is cheaper and far quieter, with fewer schools, hospitals and direct flights.
Bali is a good move if you are happy to rent and to renew a permit every year or two. In return you get warm weather, low costs and daily life in English. What you will never get is land, a passport or a year without paperwork. Rent before you buy anything, and keep evacuation cover for anything serious.
The people who stay treat it as an ordinary life in a better climate. The ones who leave came for a long holiday and found that while it is paradise, it comes at a cost.
This guide is based on public information and is not legal, tax or immigration advice. Rules change, so always confirm anything important with a qualified professional.
Living in Bali?
Get our guides before you go: the visa rules that keep changing, the tax traps, and what living somewhere costs.
About USD 1,700 a month for one person on a normal remote-work setup: a modern one-bed, coworking, a scooter and eating out several times a week. A simple room inland with local food is closer to USD 790, and a villa with a pool and a car around USD 3,060. Where you live changes the total more than anything else, and the Bali cost of living page has a calculator you can set to your own household.
You can stay indefinitely by renewing permits, but permanent status is Indonesian and slow. Holding a KITAS for the same purpose for several consecutive years can open a KITAP, a five-year renewable permanent stay permit, though the qualifying period depends on which permit you are on. Citizenship is rare and means giving up your current passport, so most long-term foreign residents in Bali simply stay residents.
Yes, once you are an Indonesian tax resident, which broadly means 183 days in a twelve-month period. Indonesia then taxes your worldwide income at progressive rates up to 35%. The E33G remote-worker KITAS is often described as tax-free, but immigration status and tax status are separate things. Reliefs such as the exemption for reinvested foreign dividends can lower your effective rate a lot, so check your own position with a tax adviser.
Not freehold. Hak Milik is reserved for Indonesian citizens. What a foreign resident can register in their own name is Hak Pakai, a right of use lasting 30 years, extendable by 20 and renewable by 30, so up to 80 years in the full sequence under the 2021 land rules. Apartments can be held on strata title, a PT PMA company can hold Hak Guna Bangunan, and most Bali villas are simply marketed as 25-year leases. Nominee structures, where an Indonesian holds the land in their name on your behalf, are void rather than enforceable, so avoid them.
Yes, through a PT PMA, but the bar is higher than most people are told. The company needs IDR 2.5 billion of paid-up capital and generally over IDR 10 billion of investment excluding land and buildings, per business line per location, and the E28A investor KITAS separately requires you to hold IDR 10 billion of shares in it yourself. Whether your activity is open to foreign ownership at all depends on the exact KBLI code: restaurants in a permanent building are open, the cafe code has been blocked for new foreign registration in Bali, and small retail is largely reserved for Indonesian businesses. BKPM sanctioned 423 foreign-linked businesses in Bali in 2025, so get the classification right before you spend anything.
At the big banks, only with a KITAS or KITAP. BCA, Mandiri, BNI and BRI all ask for a stay permit, though OCBC NISP and a few Permata branches have opened accounts for foreigners without one. Bring your passport, your permit, proof of your address and a sponsor letter if the permit came through a company, and go in person: nobody opens a foreigner account through the app. BCA is the usual pick for its ATM network and English app. The exception is the Second Home Visa deposit, which has to sit in a state bank such as Mandiri, BNI, BRI or BTN.
For an island this size, yes. Green School, Canggu Community School and Bali Island School teach in English and take foreign families, and hospitals in the south handle everyday pediatric care. Fees are the real constraint. Families usually pick Sanur, Umalas or Ubud over Canggu because of the traffic and the daily drive to school.
For 90 days, yes. When a shop sells you a prepaid SIM against your passport it files a tourist registration that clears your handset for 90 days. After that the phone drops to Wi-Fi on Indonesian networks, and another SIM will not fix it, because the block is on the handset. To keep it working you register the IMEI with customs: the first USD 500 of value is exempt if you do it at the arrivals hall, while registering at a customs office later, up to 60 days after arrival, means duty and VAT on the full declared value. A roaming eSIM from a foreign provider sidesteps the rule entirely, and buying a phone in Indonesia avoids it, since those are already registered.
Yes, in your own name, if you hold a KITAS or KITAP. Samsat wants the permit, your passport and a letter showing where you live, and a tax number more often for a car than a bike. On a tourist visa you cannot register a vehicle, which is why so many scooters are bought in a local friend's name. Avoid that, because whoever is named in the BPKB ownership book is the legal owner, whoever paid for it. Transfers got cheaper when the used-vehicle transfer duty was abolished on 5 January 2025, so a motorbike balik nama now costs well under a million rupiah in administrative fees. Check the STNK is current before you pay, because a vehicle unregistered for two years can be struck off for good.
Not Jakarta bad, but not clean either. The south spends much of its time above both WHO guidelines, 5 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic meter as an annual average and 15 over 24 hours, from traffic and from waste burned at the roadside. Burning has increased since Suwung, the landfill for Denpasar and Badung, was ordered to stop taking organic waste in April 2026 and to close entirely from August. Long-stayers deal with it indoors: a HEPA purifier in the bedroom, a cheap PM2.5 monitor to tell you when to shut the windows, and washing the air conditioning filters monthly, since they catch dust rather than fine particles.
Traffic in the south, by far. After that: permit renewals that never stop, the wet season, and water shortages in the busiest areas during the dry months.
